If you have a need for creating and/or sharing documents, you should really try Microsoft Office Web Apps. It’s free and you’ll get 25GB of free storage space on Sky Drive. You don’t have to have any version of Office on your computer to use, for free, Word, Excel, PowerPoint or One Note. Once you’ve created or uploaded documents from your computer, you can share them or work with someone simultaneously on your document. Microsoft keeps track of all changes and who made them. Read more about it here.
With Web Apps, you can create and share documents in the clouds. If you are using Office 2010, saving documents directly to your Sky Drive is an option. If you’re using an earlier version of Office, simply upload any documents to SkyDrive. Although it’s not possible to upload an entire folder of documents, you can select all the documents from a folder and upload them. No need to go document by document.
Below is a 4” video that I made that gives you a tour of Office Web Apps that will walk you through how to:
- get your free account & log in (just need a Windows Live ID)
- get around in the Office section of Sky Drive
- edit an excel document in your browser
- switch the same excel document to edit using Excel
- uploading and downloading documents
- sharing docs with friends, co-workers, etc.
If you use Google docs and have ever uploaded a Microsoft document into their system and opened it, you probably had a rude shock to see your formatting skewed, images missing and fonts switched. I know it’s happened to me. With Microsoft, you have 25GB of free storage and your documents will look as intended. Why not start uploading your documents today and get your folder permissions set. Use this space as one of your backups and have anywhere access to your documents.
I’ve been using Skydrive for several years now and it’s been a benefit to me. What have you found?